


welcome to the black parade

by commas_and_ampersands



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 09:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13120920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commas_and_ampersands/pseuds/commas_and_ampersands
Summary: Draco sees Thestrals for the first time.





	welcome to the black parade

**Author's Note:**

> Written April 2011, some minor edits December 2017. Title is taken from My Chemical Romance.

Draco had no idea what to do the first time he'd laid eyes on the skeletal horse.  He'd jerked at the sight, prompting Pansy to fret over him and Blaise to regard him with even more disdain.  Terror was on his lips, ready to burst out demand to know how they could miss these creatures - these  _monsters_  - pulling along the carriages were there had once been air.  But he swallowed the impulse.  Obviously, they did not see them.  
  
For a moment, he felt as though the ground was coming undone beneath him, and the whole world spun away.  He thought of his father's tenuous grip on reality, and how his mother held the Malfoy patriarch there through sheer strength of will.  He thought of Bellatrix's eyes, the ones that haunted his nightmares.  He thought of all the childhood taunts telling him that one day he would go mad.  It was in his blood and in his name.  Bad faith; bad fate.  
  
Then he saw something perhaps stranger than the feral beasts pulling along carriages full of ignorant students.  He saw that mad girl, Loony Lovegood, pause before ascending to her seat and pat one of them on the neck.  She whispered something to it and then turned back to her friends, that useless Longbottom and Girl Weasley.  
  
Girl Weasley who burned him with her eyes, damning him for his sins.  
  
Pansy's fingers wound around his wrist, dry and cool.  "Is that what's got you jumpy?  Poor little poor girl?"  
  
Draco almost snapped at her, thinking it was ridiculous, but then he remembered.  How could he have forgotten?  Bill Weasley's face was a ruin, and he'd been the one to cause it.  When he let Fenrir into the castle....  
  
He shuddered, trying to shield himself from those memories.  Pink drool on the werewolf's chin, Bellatrix's echoing laughter, Dumbledore falling forever and into oblivion.  
  
Pansy took his arm with authority.  "She's nothing, Draco," Pansy insisted.  "Now get into the carriage.  Unless you'd rather _walk_ to Hogwarts."  She laughed at the suggestion, certain in its own ridiculousness.  Once, Draco might have laughed along with her.  But once was a very long time ago (and a very long fall away).  
  
Draco took a deep, steadying breath.  He'd known this would be hard; his mother would have kept him home if Bellatrix hadn't insisted he come back to school.  He was willing to accept hatred; he'd just wished he'd been forewarned about bloody hallucinations.  
  
He glanced up at the carriage that held the mad Ravenclaw girl.  She was still looking at the horse that could not be there.  
  
"Draco!" Pansy hissed, pulling at him.  "I'm leaving, with or without you."  
  
Finally, Draco turned back to her.  She was standing three feet away from a beast of death, black as ebony.  It exhaled and nickered like a regular horse.  Still, he wondered if it howled.  
  
"I'll walk," Draco murmured.  "Go ahead."  
  
Pansy turned pink with indignation and spun on her heel.  She clambered into the carriage in quite the snit.  Blaise smiled cruelly.  Crabbe and Goyle started to jump down and walk with them until he waved them off.  Theo Nott didn't acknowledge him at all.  None of this came as any surprise.  
  
The final carriage pulled away from Draco.  He watched the dark line move closer to the castle, pushing ever onward.  It reminded him of funeral processions, a black parade.  
  
He shuddered and started walking.  


* * *

  
It was months before he saw another one of those creatures, and it was too soon.  Just a few weeks before the winter holidays, Draco had snuck out of the castle, needing to be alone.  School had been worse than anyone could have anticipated.  Alecto and Amycus treated some Slytherin children with a certain amount of deference, but he was not one of them.  They had witnessed the night he failed to kill Dumbledore, and they never let him forget it.  Draco knew Headmaster Snape was the only thing that stood between him and the full array of the Carrows' disciplinary measures.  
  
In the meantime, he had to deal with housemates who were gleeful at his fallen status, or others who tried to ingratiate themselves with him, predicting a Malfoy comeback in the future.  It got to the point where Draco could hardly stand even Pansy's presence, and she had been his constant through everything.  He saw disdain in every pair of eyes above green robes.

The other houses didn't bear mentioning, they were so universal in their condemnation.  Sometimes Draco thought the fact that he hadn't been hexed to death was a miracle.  If he could call Crabbe and Goyle's continuing loyalty and protection a miracle.

He wished he could talk to Headmaster Snape, but they'd each privately decided to avoid the other and Draco was loathe to alter routine at this point.  He longed for his mother and acknowledged how pathetic this was.  Hell, he would have appreciated even Potter's banal hatred; at least that would smack of normalcy.  
  
It got to the point where the vast sprawl of Hogwarts was enough to make him claustrophobic.  He'd ducked out just before sundown, his plush scarf wound around his beck and snow clutching at his robes.  He wandered towards the Forbidden Forest, not wanting to go in, but wanting the isolation the woods provided.  
  
What he found instead was barmy Luna Lovegood feeding a dead horse raw meat.  
  
He'd yelped, startling the creature.  It reared up slightly and snorted in his direction.  Draco desperately wondered if hallucinations hated Slytherin just like the rest of the castle.  
  
"You really shouldn't sneak up on a Thestral.  They start very easily."  
  
It took Draco a moment to realize Lovegood was speaking to him.  
  
"You're lucky I was here," she informed him dreamily.  "They trust me, you see.  Because I feed them."  
  
Draco gave her look he expected she was used to receiving.  Mad people must get used to it after a time.  "So... so you see it?  It's really there."  
  
Luna smiled, and the sight sickened him a little.  Up until then, he'd missed her split lip and the bruise blooming on her cheek like a dark rose.  Now he couldn't look away.  "I must tell Harry about this when I see him next.  Not that I know where he is, so please don't ask."  
  
Draco sputtered.  "Potter?  Why would you tell Potter about this?"  He hated the idea of Potter knowing he'd been afraid of these things.  He could just picture him and Lovegood laughing about it, laughing about him.  It infuriated him, and it disgusted him that he actually still cared.  
  
"He asked me the same thing two years ago," Luna explained.  "He thought he was going mad, seeing things that weren't there.  He wasn't especially relieved when he noticed I saw them too.  Since people call me Loony Lovegood."  
  
Draco shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  She couldn't know he'd come up with the nickname.  Could she?  "Do they?" he asked casually.  
  
She gazed at him, unblinking, and said, "You're a terrible actor."  
  
Draco elected to ignore that.  "So, these... zombie horses.  What are they?"  
  
The creature huffed, indignant at his name for its kind.  
  
"They're called thestrals," Luna explained, scratching the horse where its ear ought to have been.  Draco saw her fingers were pink from the cold and the stains of raw meat.  "And yes, they've always pulled the carriages.  You just haven't seen them until now."  
  
"Why?" Draco asked, appalled that hundreds of students had no idea that they'd been this close to... death.  It was like they were manifest of death, like Dementors were made from fear.  
  
Luna stiffened ever so slightly.  He might not have noticed it if he had not been so intent on not looking at the thestral.  "It’s because you've seen someone die."  
  
In his mind, he saw the light go out in Dumbledore's eyes.  The former headmaster tumbled over the battlements all over again, landing with a sickening crunch.  He had watched the moment someone left this world.  He was meant to have been the one ushering Dumbledore out of it.  
  
Amazing how he was innocent of the crime and yet still felt like a murderer.  
  
"Oh," Draco murmured, his voice very small.  "I... I see."  
  
"Harry saw Cedric die," Luna explained further.  "You remember that, don't you?"  
  
There was no accusation in her voice, but he felt certain she was reminding him anyway what a shit he'd been at fourteen.  Insisting Cedric had gotten what he'd deserved, gloating over the Dark Lord's return.  Back then, he'd seen only future glory and his father's pride, not the cost.  Moon-mad wolves with bloody jaws, his aunt's laughter crawling up his spine, and all of Dumbeldore's shattered bones.  
  
"Idiot," he hissed at himself, tearing a hand through his hair.  
  
"I'm Ravenclaw," Luna countered, perhaps purposefully misunderstanding.  "I can't be an idiot."  
  
Draco laughed quietly and without humor.  "You're lucky then."  
  
"I've been able to see thestrals since I was eleven," Luna said, not arguing, but stating a fact.  "I don't think that's very lucky."  
  
Draco felt so much colder then.  "I... I'm sorry."  
  
She blinked for what might have been the first time since they'd started talking.  "Are you?"  She seemed genuinely interested in his answer.  
  
"I'm not a monster," he snapped.  "Despite what everyone thinks."  
  
"I don't think you're a monster," Luna answered.  "I think you're racist, misguided, and in desperate need of a friend, but you're not a monster."  
  
Draco started.  The way she said he needed a friend... almost like she was offering.  But that was impossible.  She couldn't have been.  She was on Potter's side, and no one who allied themselves with the Chosen One could have sympathy for him.  Surely it was in their by-laws or something.  
  
"I was surprised that you were sorry because I've never seen you be sympathetic before," Luna elaborated.  "Consuming a moon frog can help with a lack of empathy.  Have you had one recently?"  
  
It was then that Draco remembered there was a reason she was Loony, not Luna Lovegood.  Thestrals were apparently not one of her delusions, but she had plenty of others to go around.  
  
"You don't know me," he spat.  "Don't act as though you do."  
  
She spoke again before he could leave her.  "I know you didn't want to kill Dumbledore."  
  
He froze.  His bones felt as though they were made of glass.

(Bloody, crawling, _shattered_.)  
  
"I know you regret more of your life than you'd care to admit," Luna continued.  "I know you probably have nightmares of what you've done, what you haven't done.  I know you feel alone.  I know you were sick when you saw Fenrir was inside the castle last year.  
  
"And I know you miss Harry."  
  
Every statement caused him a physical, tangible ache, but the last twisted in his gut with a wrench.  "You really are mad."  
  
"No, I'm not," she said, her voice still light as fairy dust.  "You miss Harry because you need saving, and that's what Harry does.  He saves people."  
  
The lump in Draco's throat was the size of a boulder.  "Not me.  Potter would never save me."  
  
"He would if you asked," Luna maintained.  "And he's not the only one."  
  
Draco couldn't stand there anymore.  He screwed up his eyes as if that would stop him from hearing and ignored the fire that was smoldering in his throat.  He put one foot in front of the other, avoiding trees by luck or happenstance.  
  
He felt her wide, grey eyes stay on him for an age as he walked away.  They didn't burn like Ginny's eyes, but they damned him all the same.  
  
Later, after he'd stumbled into the Room of Hidden Things, drank more than his share of pilfered firewhiskey, and wept like a child, it occurred to him that he couldn't avoid the black parade.  Everyone walked it.  They all were marching to destruction.  
  
In carriages pulled by skeletons or rushing into battle, they were all on their way to hell.


End file.
